Out Stealing Horses (12 page)

I did not know, and I was too young to look back, so I went on down the gravel path. I heard the river down there beyond the trees, and soon I heard the sounds of the dairy closest to our cabin to the south. It was the cows in the stalls behind the timber walls chewing the cud or lying in the straw, moving from one side to the other in the dark, and they were suddenly quiet, and then they were at it again. Out on the road I could hear the muffled clang of their bells, and I wondered how late it was in the night, whether morning would arrive soon, or whether I could walk down the path to the cow byre and creep inside and sit for a while to feel if it was really warm before I went on. And that is what I did. I just had to go down the path the cows would come up, past the cabin where everything was silent and no-one looked out the windows that I could see, and open the door to the dim cowshed and go in. There was a strong smell in there which was good too, and it was as warm as I had imagined it would be. I found a milking stool in the gangway between the gutters and sat down on it by the door I had shut behind me, and I closed my eyes and heard the cows' peaceful breathing behind each stall and their jaws working just as peacefully and the clanking sound of the bells and the creaking of the timbers and the soughing of the night over the roof which was not the wind but the combined hum of all that the night contained. And then I fell asleep.

I woke up feeling someone stroking my cheek. I thought it was my mother. I thought I was a little boy. I have a mother I said to myself, I forgot. And then it came to me what she looked like, feature by feature, until she was almost completely put together and was the one I had always seen, but the face I looked up at was not her face, and for a moment there I was hovering between two worlds with a half-awake eye in each. It was the dairymaid of this farm standing there, which meant it was five o'clock in the morning. I had seen her lots of times and talked to her too. I liked her. She had a voice the sound of a silver flute when she walked up the path to sing the cows home, my father had said raising his hands and holding them slightly to the side of his mouth to demonstrate with fluttering fingers and pouting lips. I did not know what a silver flute sounded like, had never heard anyone play one as far as I knew, but she smiled and looked down at me and said:

'Good morning, lambkin,' and that sounded good to me.

'I was asleep/ I said, 'it was so nice and warm in here.' I sat up with my back straight and rubbed my face with my knuckles. 'You'll need the stool.'

She shook her head. 'No, no, you just stay where you are, I have another one, that'll be fine.' And she walked down the aisle with a shiny bucket in each hand, found the other stool and sat down beside the first cow, starting to wash the pink udder, her skilled hands moving gently. She had already mucked out and covered the whole floor with sawdust so it looked clean and pleasant, and now they were all standing, in two rows: four spotted cows on each side full of anticipation and milk. She pulled the pail towards her and took hold just as gently of the teats, and milk spurted white and jingling against metal, and it looked so easy, but I had tried several times and never produced a drop.

I sat watching her with my back against the wall in the light of the lamp she had hung from a hook beside the stall; the knotted scarf holding back her hair, the golden light on her face, her inward-looking gaze and the half smile, her bare arms, and the bare knees glowing faintly below her skirts on each side of the pail, and I could not help it, but inside my trousers I grew tight so suddenly and with such force I had to gasp for breath, and I could not even remember thinking about her in that way before. I held fast to the stool with both hands and felt unfaithful towards the one I really had on my mind and knew that if I moved as much as one centimetre now, the least friction would ruin everything, and she would see it and maybe hear the helpless whimper in my chest that was already straining to get out, and then she would know how pathetic I was, and I could not bear that. So I had to think about other things to ease the pressure, and first I thought about horses as I had seen them running down the road through the village, many horses of many colours with pounding hooves raising the dust on the tinder-dry road, whirling it up and draping it like yellow curtains between the houses and the church, but that did not help me a lot, for there was something about the heat of those horses and their curved necks and rhythmic breathing as they galloped along, and all the things about horses that are hard to explain, but you
knew
were there, and then I thought about the Bunnefjord instead. The Bunnefjord at home and the very first swim in the grey-green water in spite of wind and weather on exactly May the first. How cold the water was then, and how the air was knocked out of your body with a gasp when you jumped off the sloping rocks at Katten beach and hit the glassy surface, and you could only jump one at a time because the other one had to stand at the water's edge with a rope acting as lifeguard in case the one in the water got cramps. I was only seven when we decided to do this every single year, my sister and I, not because it was pleasurable but because we felt we had to do something that demanded an extra effort, something that would hurt enough, and this felt suitably painful at the time. Three weeks earlier the German soldiers had arrived in Oslo, and they marched down Karl Johan in an endless column, and it was cold that day and silent in the street, and only the unison crash of boots, like the crack of a whip, beat in among the columns in front of the university building, struck the walls there and bounced back across the cobblestone Universitetsplassen. And then the sudden roar of Messerschmitts sweeping low over the roofs of the city coming in from the fjord, from the open sea and from Germany, and everyone stood silently watching, and my father said nothing, and I said nothing, and no-one in the whole crowd said a word. I looked up at my father, and he looked down at me and slowly shook his head, and then I too shook mine. He took my hand and led me out of the crowd on the pavement and down the street past the parliament house to the 0stbane Station to see if the bus on Mosseveien was running or if the south-bound train was on time or if everything had come to a halt that day except for the German troops who were all of a sudden everywhere. I could not remember how we had come into town, if it was by train or by bus or in someone's car, but somehow we did manage to get home, and most probably we walked.

Not long after this my father went away for the first time, and my sister and I started to swim in the cold fjord, our hearts pounding, the rope at the ready.

It did help to cool me down, thinking about the spring of 1940, and about my father as he was during those cold days and the freezing water of the Bunnefjord, from Katten to Ingierstrand, which were the beaches we went to, and soon I could loosen my grip on the stool in the cow byre and stand up without anything going amiss. The dairymaid had moved on to the next stall and sat there humming to herself with her forehead against the cow's flank thinking of nothing but that cow as far as I could tell, and then I put my stool neatly against the wall and was about to sneak out of the door and up the path to the road. But then I heard her voice behind me:

'Would you like a drop?' and I blushed and did not know why and turned round and said:

'Yes, please, that would be nice,' although I had tried to avoid fresh milk for a long time. It made my gorge rise just seeing it in a glass or a cup and thinking about how warm it was and how thick, but I had slept in her cow byre and thought about her in a way she did not know and certainly would not have liked, and I did not see how I could refuse. I took the brimming ladle she passed me and swallowed the whole of it in one gulp. I wiped my mouth hard and waited till I was sure it had all gone down, and then I said:

'Thanks. But I really must go now. My father will have breakfast ready.'

'Yes? That was good and early.' She looked at me calmly as if she knew who I really was and what I was up to, something I was not sure about myself, and I nodded a little too vigorously and turned on my heel and walked away between the stalls and out of the door and had almost reached the road before I had to throw it all up on the ground in front of me. I tore off a few fistfuls of heather and covered up the white vomit with moss so that she would not spot it immediately when she had finished milking and come up the path with the cows, and then maybe feel bad about it.

I followed the road until it narrowed into the track it really was and took a bend towards the river through the tall dewy grass on the level and it ended at a jetty that was almost hidden in the reeds in a backwater here on the east side. I walked onto the jetty and sat at the end of it with my legs dangling over the edge and boots almost in the water, and it was quite light now with the sun on its way up behind the ridge, and through the reeds I could see across to the other side of the river to the farm where Jon lived, or perhaps
had
lived, I did not know any more. They had a jetty too, and there were three rowing boats tied up to it; the one usually used by Jon, and the one I had seen his mother in when she came to the felling. The first was painted blue and the second red, and the third was green and was usually moored by our cabin if some idiot or other had not left it on the wrong bank, and the idiot was me. Now it was here. Someone had built a bench on that jetty, and on the bench sat Jon's mother, and beside her was my father. They were sitting close together. He was shaven, and she had the blue dress on with the yellow flowers that she wore when she went to Innbygda. She had his jacket over her shoulders, and his arm was round her shoulders too as mine had been not twenty-four hours earlier, but he did something that I had not done. He kissed her, and I could see she was crying, but it was not because he kissed her she was crying, and anyway he kissed her, and anyway she cried.

Maybe in those days I lacked a certain type of imagination, and possibly I still do, but what I saw happening on the other side of the river came upon me so unexpectedly that I sat there staring, with my mouth open, not cold, not hot, not even lukewarm, but with my head almost bursting with emptiness, and if anyone had caught sight of me just then, they may well have thought I had run away from a home for backward children.

I could have convinced myself that I was mistaken, that in fact I was not able to see what was happening on the other bank because the river was too wide, and what I thought I dimly saw was a man comforting a woman who had just lost a child and whose husband had been taken to hospital many, many kilometres away, who felt lonely and abandoned. But if that was the case, it was an odd time of day to be doing it, and it was definitely not the Mississippi I sat there staring across, nor the Danube, or even the Rhine, or our own Glomma for that matter, but across this not so very big river that came in a semicircle, crossing the border from Sweden and down through this valley and this village here and back into Sweden some kilometres further south, so it was a moot point whether the water perhaps was really more Swedish than Norwegian, and whether maybe it tasted Swedish if that was possible when you had swallowed some of it. And the river was not even at its widest where I sat on my jetty and they sat on their side.

So I was not mistaken. They kissed each other as if it was the last thing they would do in this life, and I could not watch them, and yet I did, and I tried to think of my mother as a son certainly ought to do when suddenly he came upon something like this, but I could not think about my mother. She slipped away and dissolved and had nothing to do with all this, and then I felt empty again and sat there staring until I could sit there no longer. I stood up slowly, hidden by the reeds and walked over the planks of the jetty as noiselessly as I could and back onto the track and some way along it, and when I turned and looked the two of them were on their feet as well and were walking hand in hand towards the farmhouse.

I did not look back again, just went across the flat field through the tall stalks and round the corner to the place where the path turned into a road and on up past the summer dairy with the cow byre I had slept in. That seemed a long time ago. The light was different now and the air was changed and the sunshine came down over the ridge. It felt nice and warm. There was something in my throat that itched and hurt in a weird way, wanting to come up, but if I swallowed hard I could keep it down. I heard the cows going up the hillside towards the Furu mountain, which was not a real mountain, just a ridge with forest on top, and there were other herds making their way to the best pastures, and bells ringing to right and left.

When I came to the place where the logging had been and the path ran down to our cabin, I stopped and listened. With all the trees gone I had a clear view of the river, and I knew I would hear a boat on its way up. But there was not a sound from that direction. The cabin looked more friendly in this light, and I could easily have gone to it and into the main room and taken the bread out of the bread tin and buttered a slice, for I was hungry now, but instead I went on along the road towards the bridge and the shop. It took me twenty minutes. Franz's house stood on a rise close to the river just this side of the bridge. From the road I could see his door open and the sun shining into the hallway. I heard the sound of music from a radio. I just walked down the gravel path right up to the entrance, took the three steps up and called in through the doorway:

'Hello! Any breakfast going here?'

'Hello, yes! Get the hell in here!' was the answer from inside.

9

The gale roars all night.
I wake up several times and hear the wind humming along the walls and more than that; it takes so fierce a hold of the house that the old timbers groan; sounds come from all sides, shrill, whistling, almost threatening sounds from the forest out there and metallic rattling and a powerful crash from somewhere I reckon must be close to the shed, and it does worry me a bit as I lie in the dark with my eyes open looking up at the ceiling, but it's warm under the duvet, and I have no intention of getting up now. And then I wonder whether the slates will hold as they are meant to or whether soon they will fly off the roof and whirl across the yard and maybe hit my car and dent it. I decide that probably they will not and go back to sleep.